by Luiz Felipe Lima De Albuquerque

Thesis: When we make room for sin and other gods, we grow distant from God and lose our identity.

"And an angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said, I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you unto the land which I sware unto your fathers; and I said, I will never break my covenant with you.

And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why have ye done this?

Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you" (Judges 2:1–3 KJV).

Thesis

The message I want to bring to you is this: when we do not remove sin today, we grow distant from God, we lose our identity, and we create a problem for our tomorrow.

Context

The book of Judges is a true study of humanity:

• Israel had finally arrived in the promised land, and after the death of Joshua, the tribe of

Judah takes the lead and must lead the expulsion of the other nations;

• Israel allows the other nations to remain and enters a vicious cycle of corruption, judgment, and purification: it falls into sin, is oppressed, cries out for mercy, and God sends a judge to lead a revolt;
• The cycle of corruption repeats itself until Israel becomes corrupt enough to sound just like Sodom, and is completely lost.

In this passage, God reminds Israel where they came from and calls the people to account for their disobedience.

• And it was not a rebuke for lacking the strength to win: the people chose to let those who should have been driven out remain.

In the end, He says that the peoples who were not driven out will be thorns in their sides, and their gods will be snares — traps.

But what do the thorns and the snares mean?

Thorns

"But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell" (Numbers 33:55 KJV).

When God speaks of thorns, He gives us an image of ongoing punishment, of continual pain:

• Israel's lack of discipline and firmness caused more problems than the ones they were trying to avoid: sparing the other nations of Canaan only brought oppression, loss of identity, and moral decay.
• One example is the Midianites in the days of Gideon, who constantly destroyed the Israelites' crops and forced them to hide in caves. Gideon himself had to prepare his food in secret.
• Another example is the time of Deborah and Barak, when Jabin (king of Canaan) and his commander Sisera are mentioned — and Scripture itself says they were exceedingly cruel and violent.

To make matters worse, even their descendants had to deal with what was left of these nations afterward, as with Saul, David, and Solomon.

• The evil they allowed to coexist with them became a recurring problem that even their descendants inherited, without any need for it. They did not have to go through that.

But why did leaving these peoples become such a serious problem?

"And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel." (Judges 2:10 KJV).

Because of this permissiveness and this lax attitude, the people of Israel were gradually losing their identity:

• Later generations were lost because they lacked knowledge of their own history;
• They also had no relationship with God, and intermarried with the other peoples, giving their children in marriage to the daughters of the nations of Canaan;
• One example of this is Samson — a great warrior, yet defeated by the hand of Delilah.

And what do we — Christians — have to do with such an ancient story?

"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16 KJV).

Just as Israel was God's kingdom in the past, we Christians are the kingdom of God in the present:

• We are under the jurisdiction of Jesus Christ, and just like the people of Israel, we need to be watchful of the wolves of our own time;
• While Israel was called to physically drive out the peoples of Canaan, we need to drive out:
• The devil, who looks for opportunities in our weaknesses (Ephesians 4);
• False prophets and false teachers, who teach lies (II Peter 2);
• False brothers, who claim to be Christians but do not truly obey God (I Corinthians 5);
• And most important of all: the very evil that we ourselves must reject (I Thessalonians 5).

Notice that, just as allowing the other nations to remain destroyed Israel's identity, allowing these enemies to remain will destroy our identity as the Church of Christ. If I do not do what Christ says, whose church am I?

We need to ask ourselves: what have we allowed to remain in the church without doing anything about it? Which enemies of God have we allowed into our midst, or into our own lives?

The evil we do not remove today becomes a problem for us tomorrow.

Snares

It's worth noticing that when God speaks of the gods of Canaan, He describes them as bait attached to a trap:

• In other words, the people of Israel would struggle with these false gods precisely because they would be attractive.
• Baal (Hadad), Asherah, Chemosh, Dagon, and the rest promised fertility, prosperity, and riches — but in the end, as we see, they only deformed Israel further.

And it's remarkable how much this caused Israel to lose its own identity:

• One example is Micah, of the tribe of Ephraim, who stole from his own mother (and she blessed him for it), kept idols in his house, and paid a Levite to serve as his "personal priest," believing God would bless him because of it.

Another horrifying example is the men of Gibeah (tribe of Benjamin), who threatened to abuse a Levite — and whose words sound eerily familiar:

"Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him" (Judges 19:22 KJV).

In case that scene sounds familiar, let's go back to Genesis 19…

"And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them" (Genesis 19:5 KJV).

The gods of Canaan corrupted the people of Israel so thoroughly that they sounded exactly like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

• Although the tribe of Benjamin was not completely wiped out, the other tribes nearly exterminated it.
• But why did allowing these gods become such a problem?

"And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers: and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served Baalim: And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them, and provoked the LORD to anger" (Judges 2:10-12 KJV).

In other words, Israel failed to teach the generations that came after!

• The later generations lacked sufficient knowledge of God and of the history their ancestors had lived through;
• One generation's negligence became the next generation's rebellion.

And God had warned about exactly this in the past!

"And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full; Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage" (Deuteronomy 6:5-12 KJV).

The earlier generations are responsible for teaching the ones who come after:

• Parents should not simply tell their children to read the Bible: they should talk about it together, model right conduct, and shape the home so that the Word of God is constantly kept in view;
• And beyond that, they should remember that every achievement they had was given to them by God.

Somewhere along the way, one generation failed the next.

And what do we — Christians — have to do with this loss of identity? And what do we have to do with false gods?

"For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was" (James 1:23-24 KJV).

It doesn't matter how much we know about the Word, or how much history our congregation has: if we don't do what the Word says, we will begin to lose ourselves.

• We need to remember where we came from and what God has done for us;
• And we cannot forget that what He says must be our priority.

The worst part is that when we begin to lose ourselves, new idols — new false gods — are waiting for us:

"Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5 KJV).

When I give myself to sexual immorality, impurity, disordered desire, greed for money, pleasure, or power, I am already committing idolatry. Instead of Baal (Hadad), Asherah, Chemosh, or Dagon, I have abandoned God to serve myself.

• In the end, our new false gods are our own desires.
• When I choose to follow a wrong desire and put God in second place, I am already losing my identity as a Christian and becoming exactly what these false gods want me to become.

Just as Israel forgot its history and went off to worship other gods, letting sin go on making its home in us will destroy our identity as the Church of Christ as well. If we worship ourselves, whose church are we?

We need to ask ourselves: have we kept our history with God alive? Has He truly been the priority in our lives? Have we passed this on to the ones coming up behind us?

When we do not remove sin today, we grow distant from God, we lose our identity, and we create a problem for our tomorrow.

Conclusion

The book of Judges ends with Israel completely unrecognizable and lost:

• The people who had once been God's chosen people neglected their mission and allowed their enemies to live among them;
• They also failed to pass on their history with God and what they had learned, and the generations that followed became so lost that they were unrecognizable.

We need to walk the opposite path:

• We need to fight whatever forces oppose God;
• We need to be firm and do exactly what the Lord has commanded us in His Word;
• We need to pass on both our knowledge and our history with the Father, so that the coming generations will know of His care for us, and that our victories were given to us by Him.

May God bless us.